New Jersey, in contrast to its neighbors on either side, was one of the most thoroughly English of all the colonies. The settlements of the Dutch in the north, and the squabbles of a few hundred Dutch, Swedes, and Finlanders in the south, left little trace on the population when colonization once started in earnest. The real history of the colony begins in 1664 when the English proprietors, to whom it had been granted, began to colonize it seriously.
Northern New Jersey was a chaos of rugged hills and forests which offered little to the settler and is still largely waste land. The southern part of the State is also largely waste land, consisting chiefly of pine barrens so that early settlement was virtually limited to two areas. On the North River, as the Hudson was called, the lands along the meadows opposite Manhattan Island were inviting, and on the South River, as the Delaware was originally designated, there was a broad strip of fertile farm land which attracted the early settlers. Among other centers New Haven had established a colony there about 1640, but had been driven off by the Dutch. There was also some extremely fertile land around Freehold and other towns on the line between New York and Philadelphia.
Since these two areas were so inaccessible to each other by direct communication, the State grew up in two distinct settlements; that along the western side of New York harbor, then known as East Jersey, and that on the Delaware, known as West Jersey. While these two were consolidated administratively in 1702, they have never been wholly consolidated in actual character, and the two ends of the State are, even today, diverse enough to show their somewhat divergent origin.
The land along the Delaware was colonized, for the most part, directly from England by the Quakers who had secured an interest in it, and who established the only two towns of importance in West Jersey during the Colonial period—Burlington in 1667 and Salem in 1675. Those who established Burlington were mostly from Yorkshire with a large group also from London, and they took opposite sides of the town, the Yorkshire people spreading north and the London people spreading south. Geographical difficulties checked the southward spread so that Cape May was settled separately by people from Connecticut and from Long Island. Later, some of the French Huguenots went down into West Jersey, but it always remained essentially an English colony, largely of Quaker complexion and influenced by the close proximity of co-religionists in Pennsylvania.
East Jersey, like western New York, represents more directly a New England outpost. Elizabethtown had been established in 1665 by emigrants sent direct from Great Britain, but Newark had at almost the same time been colonized by people from Connecticut, who at first gave to it the name of their old home, Milford. The Elizabethtown Association somewhat later sold part of its territory to people from New Hampshire and Massachusetts who established the two hamlets of Woodbridge and Piscataqua, now New Brunswick.
In 1666, Connecticut Puritans also established on the Passaic River first Guilford, and later Branford, both of which with Milford merged in the town of Newark. The New England overflow continued until the shores of Newark Bay had become another New England colony. Such communities as the Oranges were chiefly transplanted Puritan towns.
The proprietorship of East Jersey shortly passed into the hands of Scotsmen and a steady immigration of these began about 1684. The capital of East Jersey, Perth Amboy, was named for one of the proprietors, James Drummond, the Earl of Perth. The colony soon became, and has ever since remained, one of the strongholds of Scotch Presbyterianism in America, which found its intellectual center in the establishment of Princeton University.
For a long time the two sections of New Jersey were of about equal size and importance. As the country between them gradually filled up, the State grew slowly until at the time of the Revolution its population was estimated at about 120,000. Another fifteen years saw a healthy growth, the first census, in 1790, showing 184,139 inhabitants. The somewhat complicated details of its development should not obscure the fact that New Jersey was one of the most purely white, Protestant, Nordic settlements in the colonies.
Although prior to the arrival of William Penn there were several thousand settlers on the Delaware River, in the territory now covered by Pennsylvania and Delaware, the real settlement of that region is generally dated from the beginning of his operations in 1681, when Upland, now Chester, was settled as his headquarters. A year later Philadelphia was founded, and in spite of this late start grew so rapidly that William Penn, the Quaker, at his death, had the satisfaction of knowing that the City of Brotherly Love was the largest in North America.
While the foundation stock was made up of English Quakers, Penn had ambitious ideas of establishing a headquarters for other like-minded persons, and with this idealism was apparently mixed a solid commercial ambition which led him and his agents to advertise the merits of the colony widely. The land system, unlike that of Virginia or New Netherlands, favored the settler with small means. English and Welsh farmers rapidly appropriated to themselves the country along the west side of the Delaware River from Trenton to Wilmington.